The all-new FlashBlade is here from Pure Storage

Yesterday (14-Mar), Pure Storage announced their new All-Flash products at the Pure//Accelerate event. FlashBlade is to support unstructured data (File, Object, containers etc…) requirements and FlashArray//m10 to strengthen their FlashArray//m series. FlashBlade, the cloud-scale data platform provides All-Flash efficiency and performance for their customers cost effectively.

FLASHBLADE

FlashBlade is the industry’s first All-Flash NAS solution as per my understanding. This is a new approach from Pure to meet the next-gen requirements. Scale-out blade modules for elastic scalability. System will have only Flash modules – no SSDs and no HDDs.

Hardware : FlashBlade can have a minimum configuration of 7 blades which forms a cluster. Each blade can have 8TB or 52 TB of internal flash capacity. The flash modules are PCIe attached to the blades and they use proprietary protocol. This helps the customer to select the configuration based on their capacity requirements. In a 4U module, FlashBlade can deliver 10Gb/s and can have upto 16PB raw capacity. Blades have 40GB ethernet ports for communication between blades.

The system is now supporting only NFS protocol. SMB, Object and S3 support will be available in future releases. More data services including data reduction, snapshots etc… also will be available soon. FlashBlade systems management is made easy with the Pure1 cloud-based management tool.

Availability : Early-access to the FlashBlade is now available for customers, but the systems for production will be GA towards the 2nd Half of 2016.

FlashArray//m10

This is new addition to the FlashArray//m models from Pure. Customers can buy a minimum configuration of 15 TB or 30TB and then grow their system as per requirement. FlashArray//m10 system can be upgraded to any of it’s big-brothers in the FlashArray//m family.

One of the attractions from the new comer is that the customers can have ‘everything’ at a starting price less than $50K. This includes all the softwares, Evergreen storage (offer from Pure to have free upgrades to add new features to the existing storage system, without the need of repurchasing the entire hardware and migrating the data). The product can also be purchased as a FlashStack CI for a starting price of nearly $100K.